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milleart · 15 days ago

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hello! it's your 7kpp secret santa here and WOW that's some delicious piece of info! i love how in depth your response is! with that said... *puts on interviewer hat* another round of questions i would like to ask are:

what are nayeli and lien hua's roles during week 5's theatrical, and what are their thoughts about it as the theatrical descends further into a charade of what it's supposed to be?

did nayeli and lien hua give anything to their SOs and if yes, what did they give (i don't wish to assume that they gave their SOs the best gifts from the options in the game) and how are their letters like? (e.g. lengthy paragraphs, legibility of their handwritings, ink stains on their letters etc.)

not really relevant to the gift itself, but why did you choose the names "nayeli" and "lien hua" for them, and why did you choose yellow/orange and green/white for their colour schemes? p.s. i love their designs!

thank you for reading, sorry that this time is more rambly!

no thank you for all your questions!! it's been really fun to ramble about my girls a bit 🩷

1. Oh god the theatrical :') After the trial, Lien Hua was absolutely drained and overwhelmed so the moment the theatrical came up she was just "oh fuck no". She immediately beelined for the backstage work before Jaslen was even halfway through explaining the main character roles. Still, she does most of the delegate herding/"please get your shit together" speeches because of her sense of responsibility, but she's not really enjoying it at all. She doesn't feel like it's proper to host something like that after everything that happened but wouldn't voice it openly.

Nay meanwhile jumped in on the acting because a) it's silly and fun and b) she doesn't really want to think about the trial and everything that happened there anymore, it really shook her up. Sharp-tongued Vienna was a perfect fit for her and she even got to tease Blain on stage a bit so all in all a great opportunity. She's great at improvising and has a lot of presence + she gets along with Zarad well so it was fun to play together. And she totally jived with the pirate chicken attack.

2. Gifts! :3 Lien Hua likes her gifts to be practical, useful. Part of is her personality, part of it is because it's less emotionally vulnerable to give something that another person can use (no matter their feelings towards the source) rather than something that would only have value based on the recipient's relationship with her. She absolutely overthinks stuff like this.

During the Summit, she'd probably want to give Jarrod something he could use but that'd also encourage his growth. I can see her getting him a small and good quality leather journal, thinking that since he has so many (usually negative) opinions on everything, he could use a place to write them down instead of bellowing them to the world. Of course she wouldn't frame it like that, she'd make it into something much more ego-stroking and say it's for recording aaaall his victories and successful hunts and thoughts because someone like him must have soooo many of them to share wink wink.

Nayeli's a bit more chill about gifting, she just enjoys seeing people's reactions to whatever she saw that made her think of them. She also likes her gifts to feel like treasure so they usually come with a tale about how she found it.. or some embellished backstory she made up on the spot to entertain. Blain loves beautifying himself so it'd be super obvious to get him something in that vein, and lucky for him Nay loves sparklies too so she'd get him some pretty accessory like the cravat pin mentioned in game. Coupled with a cheeky but effusive letter with tons of extremely blatant praise.

Handwriting-wise, it's kind of a funny contrast in a way. Nay's dad was very big on calligraphy practice and all that so even though it was boring for her all these hours spent on practicing made it so that Nay's handwriting is actually really nice and legible, you wouldn't think it belongs to her at first. The letters are well-formed even though they might have a bit of a forward slant when she writes fast (which is often), she also adds little flourishes here and there, if you're really observant you'd notice it reflects her mood too, she presses her pen hard if frustrated or irritated. Her letters are very stream of consciousness, she doesn't really compose them before hand unless it's really important/official.

Lien Hua's handwriting is very efficient, not a great feat of calligraphy but not illegible. It's somewhat nicer when she writes in Jiyeli, but in general its the kind of handwriting you'd be happy to see if you borrowed study notes from someone. There's not much flourish, the letters are small and evenly spaced. Her hands tremble when she's extremely stressed or upset though, if you see her letters get wobbly it means things are really bad. She reads a lot of course so her letters sound nice, with long and thoughtful paragraphs. At the same time, she can be a bit warmer in her letters than in person. She's not always good at saying the emotional stuff openly.

3. This part might be a bit disappointing because I usually don't go very deep with the names and go with the flow of what feels nice / seems culturally appropriate.

Lien Hua was my very first character I played and her name mostly comes from me liking the sound and meaning for it and deciding to use it when I immediately got Jiyel and saw the cultural inspiration behind it. But it means "lotus" and sounds feminine so it works well for a daughter's name in a traditional family.

Nayeli's name I put slightly more thought into! It actually means "I love you", and the love you feel in the Pirate!MCs family, on all sides, is so touching that I wanted it reflected in how they named their daughter.

Design-wise, Lien Hua was actually supposed to be wearing mainly pastel pink in the original iteration but it didn't feel right so I played around with colours until I got something that works. Also, her dress is heavily based on an ao dai, though with a skirt to make it more princessy. She'd absolutely wear pants to the Summit if she could get away with it, though.

Nay I wanted to be colorful and warm and also a bit chaotic and sparkly, I was inspired by this dress: https://pin.it/WUIqGZRGr so that's where the black/yellow combo started. The green in her jewelry is for some extra contrast, though I played around with different shades until it felt right ^^

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milleart · 24 days ago

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hello! it's your 7kpp secret santa here! it's very interesting to see someone who pairs their mcs with blain AND jarrod! the doc included in the spreadsheet is much appreciated! *puts on interviewer hat* some questions i would like to ask are:

we all know that blain can't stand the mcs simply because she exists, but is there a deeper reason to why he loathes nayeli during the summit (apart from the blackmail 🤭)

from the doc it seems like lien hua doesn't seem to love jarrod in a romantic manner, so how would she answer someone who asks her what does she like about her husband?

happy holidays and a happy new year!

hiiiii anon, hope you're having a wonderful new year and thank you so much for putting the effort for ssanta ❤️ i guess i do have a thing for 'difficult' romances and messy relationships ahaha...

my reply ended up being a bit rambly so i put it under a read more, hope it all makes sense!!

re: nay and blain

he could probably write a whole essay on 'why nayeli is the absolute worst' but to put it short, while blain's a petty person in general a lot of what makes nayeli nayeli is a direct antithesis to what makes blain blain.

nay's very playful and teasing and her little jokes and jabs poke blain just where it hurts the most aka his pride. he invests a lot of effort in his appearance and status but nay's irreverent humor just completely undermines that, she turns his vanity into a punchline and doesn't even have the decency to react appropriately cowed when he gets angry about it, she just finds it even more funny.

even when she's being honest with her praise he doesn't really know how to deal with it, it's praise so it makes him happy on some level but then it being nayeli immediately sours it, he doesn't know how to take it from someone like her and just chalks it up to sarcasm

on top of that she makes him feel irrelevant which is like the worst thing for someone whose entire identity is built on being the center of attention. this especially rankles him with ana because he tries SO hard to charm her but ana just doesn't give a shit. meanwhile nay makes some stupid little joke and ana's howling with laughter and slapping her knee. and it feels like every other time he finds ana nayeli's not too far behind. it's actually just because she gets along well with ana and they have fun spending time together but to him it's personal.

and to make things worse she just seems to be everywhere, always up to something. and she just doesn't seem to care about anything, about what people think - and that just doesn't compute to someone who constantly behaves as if the entire world was watching him. he doesn't catch on until much later that she thrives on being underestimated and seen as some silly airheaded hise weirdo - and by the time he does catch on, she's already got his secrets in her grasp.

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re: lien hua and jarrod

lien hua's feelings on jarrod are kind of complicated and they don't really turn romantic until muuuuuuuuuuch later.

she finds him relatively straightforward in behaviour, while she enjoys the challenge of 4d chess conversations where everything has 7 different meanings, it's tiring to be constantly on guard and analyzing. meanwhile jarrod's someone who wears his heart on his sleeve and says what he thinks, even if it's rude or crass. and it's frustrating, yes, especially since someone in his position should KNOW BETTER but at the same time it means she doesn't have to guess. and that's nice.

he also has a lot of passion and knowledge about the few specific things he cares about and they might not be things lien hua super enjoys doing herself but it's interesting. it's more than just smacking things with a sword, there's strategy and quick thinking and graceful movements. there's tracking prey, understanding how it thinks, knowing its habits, waiting for the right moment to strike. she once asked about the kind of weapon he uses and whether it was a longsword or a greatsword and the answer was a rant so intensely autistic hyperfixation-like she was positively starry-eyed. she likes that side of him.

at the same time, there's also something she doesn't consciously realize or is unwilling to admit to herself, but for the longest time she sees him as a kind of project. she's been raised in a pretty isolated way, the summit has her learn to apply her knowledge and influence outside of books and debates and there's a huge power rush in that, in being able to influence someone like him, nudge him to be something better. it's very patronising and naive, even if it comes from a place of good intentions.

it's really only after shit goes completely sideways with the exile and the long and humiliating road back to jiyel when they're both thrust completely outside of their comfort zones that things really change for them and lien hua realizes her feelings aren't so… easily categorized. that it catches up to her that maybe you don't really put yourself between someone and an angry mob just because they're a funny project for you to fix. they're both completely out of their element - jarrod stripped of his power and title and everything he was taught to believe was owed to him, lien hua's unshakeable belief that no matter what at least she's SMART having completely blown up in her face because her machiavellian plan of fixing everything went to hell - and forced to lower their defenses and really rely on eachother, plus a nice heaping of trauma bonding on top and… things happen :3c

thank youuuu for reading all this and i hope it helps, if i can clarify anything further still just ask 🙏

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